Four Easy Ways For Republicans To Attract Immigrant Voters

Jim Powell
, ContributorI cover economic and political history.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Continued from page 1

Second, some of the low-skill immigrant jobs – especially household work -- enable high-skill people to spend more time on their professional work, particularly when such couples have children. Consequently, low-skill immigrants enable us to gain more benefits from high-skill people.

Third, the income people earn upon arriving in the United States is a poor predictor of future achievement. If we turned away every immigrant who didn’t have much money, we would have missed large numbers of people who became great successes. One need only recall the mass immigration of eastern European Jews who arrived destitute. They squeezed into New York City’s Lower East Side tenements, some 700 people per acre – reportedly more crowded than the slums of Bombay. Many of these people found work as day laborers, but their children became doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell reported that “immigrants begin economically below the level of existing members of their own ethnic group already in the country, but eventually rise to surpass them. The lengthy period required to equal the economic level of people of the same race or ethnicity born on American soil suggests the amount of human capital needed – experience, contacts, personal and institutional savvy.

However, the fact that immigrants eventually surpass their native-born counterparts also suggests that migration is a selective process, bringing the more ambitious or venturesome elements of a population.”

Beyond the economic benefits of immigration, there are enormous cultural benefits. New York and California are cultural capitals, in part, because they have high foreign-born populations. People tend to become more cosmopolitan when exposed to very different ideas about business, science, technology, art, music, literature, fashion, cuisine and all sorts of other things.

Immigrants probably first began to enrich our culture with their food. The overwhelming majority of foods we love are foreign-born – they originated someplace else.

Archeological evidence suggests that chickens were first domesticated in Pakistan. Sheep seem to have been first domesticated in what is now Iraq. Cattle, in Greece and Anatolia. The Egyptians were among the earliest people to cultivate wheat.

Apples are considered about as wholesomely American as anything can be, but the apple, Malus pumila, seems to have come from central Asia. Pears and grapes are from central Asia, too. Oranges, peaches, apricots and Japanese plums are from China. Bananas, from India or Malaysia. Pineapples, from Brazil or Paraguay. Cherries, from northern Europe. Olives originated in the eastern Mediterranean.

As for vegetables, garlic and onions originated in central Asia. Scallions, sometimes referred to as Welsh onions, are from China.

The earliest green peas – Pisum sativum – were cultivated around India, Ethiopia and the Near East.

Potatoes originated in the Andes, possibly Chile from which they were probably brought to Peru, then to Ireland during the 16th century, and Irish immigrants introduced potatoes to New England.

A meager-looking maize probably originated in Peru, then crossed with other varieties to emerge in Guatemala as flour corn which was brought to North America and hybridized into modern sweet corn during the 19th century.

Tomatoes originated in the Andes, but perhaps because they’re in the same botanical family as deadly nightshade, Americans avoided them until the 18th century, after Europeans showed they weren’t poisonous.

The American language became the richest in the world, because the settlers encountered so many different kinds of people.